I think this is a great story. It brings up some interesting (as in, ambiguous) moral and ethical dilemmas, with a secondary challenge to the myth that technology is "value free" (that is, "technology is neither good or evil").
Perhaps, when you stated "there's nothing of intellectual substance here", you meant, "I failed to see anything of intellectual substance here."
Fair enough. If your role is to enforce policy, it makes sense. When I examined this further, I find the reaction of the HN community more interesting than the article itself.
I've been making a dive into Ken Wilber's arguments about modernity, and the differentiation and disassociation of the various value spheres (science, art, and morals). The issues that this news item brings up a lot of interesting and real-world issues to test Wilber's arguments against.
The vast majority of the news items here focuses on the science sphere, or rather, the technology. Science is values-free. Is technology also values-free? I used to think it is values free. If you make a piece of tech, the tech itself is no good or bad, the people who use them are good or bad. But is it really? I remember reading Kevin Kelly's blog post on that, "What technology wants". It disturbed me at that time because it was a change in some deeply-held world view. I also thought about it some more. Unlike scientific discoveries, technology is inherently in the social domain. There are technologies for which we don't have clear scientific theories on, and yet people use them. Technology is tightly coupled to people, and you cannot disassociate the science behind the technology and the uses and moral/ethical implications of that technology.
Ken Wilber's argument is that, while differentiation of the value spheres leads to what he calls the dignity of modernity, the disassociation of the value spheres leads to what he calls the disaster of modernity. And I think technology is a great place to examine how the various value spheres comes together. It would be irresponsible of the HN community not to consider these together.
One of the values at play here in this article is, are these Tesla memorial folks making a fair request from the Elon Musk, or are they opportunists? There are many other articles and stories similar to this, so is this interesting? The issues involved are in the moral sphere. There are no ambiguous uses of technology. Should the community even concern itself with this at all?
If this is uninteresting or irrelevant to the the HN community, is that a form of differentiation or is that a form of disassociation? Further, looking at the people commenting on this, people on HN are inclined to think that the Oatmeal plea is somehow violating dignity, that there is already a proper differentiation without disassociation. On the other hand, my reading of the Oatmeal plea is that, despite explicit statements saying they are not trying to force Elon Musk into doing anything, it's essentially saying that there is a disassociation, and therefore, part of the disaster of modernity.
So while this story may not fit in with HN policy, or with the community values, the story and the reactions to it brings up a lot of interesting things for me.
Perhaps, when you stated "there's nothing of intellectual substance here", you meant, "I failed to see anything of intellectual substance here."